Create and publish collection of public domain poems from 19th centuryAlso, I'm not sure where you got the idea that US copyright lasts for 150 years, but that is not correct. The US has had a number of changes to their copyright laws, but basically any books published prior to 1923 are no longer protected. Books published after that had to have their copyright renewed every 28 years or they fell into the public domain. There were a couple of changes that happened between 1964 and 1998 that complicated things further, but the current coverage is for the life of the author plus 70 years. copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

Jan1

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Create and publish collection of public domain poems from 19th centuryThere are a couple of different ways in which the examples you gave are currently available through Amazon. First of all, any that were submitted prior to the middle of 2011 were grandfathered in. The current Amazon policy went into effect in Feb. 2011, and started being really enforced about the middle of 2011. The second example are books that were converted from sources such as the Gutenberg Project and are available for free. There are others that may slip through the initial review, but Amazon usually catches those and removes them in time.